Conventionally, a white light source has been realized that generates white light by converting a portion of blue light emitted by a blue LED into yellow light by using a wavelength converter, and mixing the blue light with the yellow light. Various types of lighting equipment utilizing such a white light source have been commercialized.
However, lighting equipment using the above-described white light source is likely to produce illumination light not achieving desirable appearance of objects. This occurs because the illumination light of the white light source does not contain a sufficient red light component, which leads to the appearance of objects not being desirable.
Thus, proposals have been made for improving illumination light in terms of how objects appear therein by adding a red light source of red light to the white light source of white light, thereby supplementing the red light component (see Patent Literature 1).